The Personal Professor: continuing medical education meets the new media

Abstract

P learn from their patients. The lessons patients teach us in the emergency room, examining room, treatment room, even on the telephone, fundamentally shape our professional knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. However, therein is a longstanding dichotomy that traditional forms of continuing medical education (CME) focus on others’ clinical experiences rather than our own. Although knowledge gained from hospital grand rounds and journal articles is indispensable to understanding and keeping abreast of medical progress, a large leap is often needed to make the connection from the lecture hall to practice encounters. New means of learning and getting CME credit for that learning are emerging through advances in communication technology. Through digitization, the personal computer allows the bridging of this separation between what we do and what we learn. Computer programs are being designed so that a physician can draw on his/her own experiences in a new form of learning never before possible and receive CME credit for it. A new Internet-based CME activity called The Personal Professor is such a “new media” program for physicians. The Personal Professor offers physicians the opportunity to objectively compare individual medical practice habits with current, credible standards and guidelines in a convenient, private, and CME-certified forum of learning. Each Personal Professor program allows each physician to enter data that can be recalled, or when necessary, extracted directly from selected patients’ medical records. The program analyzes the degrees to which the patient data matches current parameters for diagnosis, treatment, and prevention, and compares answers with those of other participants. The list of questions in Table 1, which are to be answered by the physician participant, is an example of a comparative interaction addressing coronary risk factors that apply to a study patient in The Personal Professor program, “Stable Angina Pectoris.” In this type of question, there is no real “right” or “wrong” answer, other than instances in which important patient information is simply not obtained. Following each comparative interaction, in which data are entered from the patient’s medical record, there is a follow-up question, answer, and reference that may be obtained at the conclusion of the activity (Table 2). In each activity, there are 20 to 30 such interactions, under several categories (varying according to From the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana; and Baylor Heart & Vascular Center, Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, Texas. Manuscript received and accepted June 27, 2002. Address for reprints: Vincent E. Friedewald, Jr., MD, Multimedia Communications, Department of Film, Television and Theatre, 224 Decio Faculty Hall, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556. E-mail: vfriedew@nd.edu. TABLE 2 Sample Follow-up Question and Answer